The CEO of Ozon on Building an e-Commerce Giant in a Cash-Only Economy

Ozon CEO Maelle Gavet left the Boston Consulting Group to join Ozon in part because she had once been an entrepreneur and missed the excitement - but mostly because she saw the company's potential to become the Amazon of Russia. Russians were going online at an extraordinary rate; if Ozon could figure out how to deliver goods in an e-commerce market, despite the country's shaky distribution systems, its growth would skyrocket. The company's success in e-commerce would hinge on logistics and customer support. Ozon had to persuade people that they could get their goods more quickly and reliably by ordering them online and having them delivered than by hoping to find them in stock at a shop. It needed a way to safely take and process the cash that Russians usually pay with. And it had to provide personal contact with customers and harvest data about their purchases and preferences. This is the story of how Gavet and her team met those challenges.